gracchusdixit

It is now quite apparent that the Presidential convention of the Republican Party, which will be held in Cleveland at the end of July, is going to be an ugly brawl.  Although Donald Trump is all but certain to arrive in the “Rock ‘n Roll Capital of the World” with more primary and caucus votes than any other candidate, it is anything but certain that he will have an absolute majority.  Even if he eventually manages to pull that off, his opponents seem determined to do everything in their power to gum up the works.

The wily (and oily) Ted Cruz has been lining up delegates by manipulating the arcane rules of state party politics.  John Kasich refuses to surrender, insisting in the face of all evidence to the contrary that he can still become the ultimate choice of the convention, either because so many Republicans detest Trump and Cruz (which is undeniably true) or because only he can beat the dreaded Hillary Clinton in a general election (which is more dubious).  Even Marco Rubio, defeated but apparently undaunted, is now wangling to hang onto the hundred or so delegates he won before dropping out of the race, to what end nobody knows.

All of this melodrama—some of it serious, most of it merely comical—makes the prospect of a contested or “brokered” Republican convention more likely than anyone would have imagined just a few weeks ago.

This prospect absolutely thrills the pontificators in the news media, since such a spectacle hasn’t occurred in decades and would create boundless opportunities for the pontificators to ply their trade, which is to talk endlessly about things that may or may not have any real consequence.  One can scarcely blame them.  They are like children longing for a lollipop.

The problem for the Republican Party, of course, is that the Presidency is not a lollipop, and today is not 50 years ago.

Once upon a time, political conventions were the forums where the real business of national politics was done.  The horse-trading that led to the nomination of Presidential candidates was frequently conducted in secret and was very often shady.  Deals were made and bargains were struck, if not always in the “smoke-filled rooms” of popular imagination, then at least well out of sight.

All that changed—or was supposed to have changed—after the turbulent decade of the 1960s.

At the 1964 Republican convention, Barry Goldwater pulled off what amounted to a right-wing putsch, absconding with the nomination of his party by outmaneuvering its establishment.  His defeat in the subsequent general election was one of the most calamitous in American history—a loss so total and so traumatizing that it galvanized the Republican party to ensure that such a debacle would never happen again.

The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago was in some ways even worse.  It was a total shambles as well as a scandal, marred by a “riot” on the part of the Chicago Police Department and compromised by the cobbled-together nomination of Hubert Humphrey, an utterly decent man, to be sure, but also a man that nobody apart from the party’s power brokers wanted as their nominee.  The result was a humiliating loss to Richard Nixon.  We all know how that turned out.

Because of these catastrophes, our country’s two political parties decided, in their own, very different ways, to “reform” the procedures by which their candidates were to be chosen.  Primaries and caucuses, thought to be more democratic—with a lower-case “d”—were to take precedence.  Conventions were to become less important—spectacles carefully orchestrated to display party unity in front of the ubiquitous television cameras.  The bad old days of back-room dealing were to be shut away in a metaphorical closet, like an embarrassing, demented relative.

Shut away but, as it now turns out, not done away.

While the Democrats have (thus far at least) been able to contain and channel the  restless energy of the progressives in their ranks, the Republicans have utterly lost control of the angry chunk of their electorate that is rooting for Trump.  Precisely why these people are so angry remains a bit mysterious, since most of them are far better off than the minorities and immigrants they abhor, and more than a few of them are generously subsidized by the government they abominate.  Whatever their reasons, they seem to be well and truly pissed—not only at the scapegoats they loathe but at their own political party.

If that party denies Donald Trump the nomination, if he is rejected after winning a plurality of primary and caucus votes, if some “white knight” who never bothered to compete in the primaries and caucuses is dropped onto the stage at the last moment, like the deus ex machina in an ancient play, there will be all hell to pay.  Trump and his followers will not go quietly into the night like Barry Goldwater.  They and he will boom and thunder; they will carpet bomb, not the sands of the Middle East, but the political party that did them in.  If the power-brokers of the Republican Party decide to “broker” their convention in Cleveland in the hope of winning the general election, they will not only fail in that, they will break their party into shards and splinters.